Meet the CultureBrew.Art Team
Valerie is the founding Artistic Producer of Visceral Visions, and an award-winning theatre artist who performs, writes, directs, dramaturges, and produces. The founder and creative visionary of CultureBrew.Art, Valerie is an acknowledged leader on issues of diversity and decolonization in the Canadian arts sector. Her first producing credit was the Dora-nominated premiere of The Yoko Ono Project, written by Jean Yoon; since making Vancouver her home, she has developed and/or produced the premieres of four productions, including Marie Clements’ Aboriginal blues-rock multimedia musical, The Road Forward. A recipient of the Enbridge playRites Award for Emerging Canadian Playwright, Gordon Armstrong Playwrights Rent Award, and John Moffat + Larry Lillo Prize, she has been artist-in-residence with National Arts Centre and Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, associate artist with Urban Ink Productions, and guest artist with Canada’s National Voice Intensive as well as Primary Colours/couleurs primaire’s 2018 Banff residency. She is a member of Canadian Actors’ Equity, UBCP/ACTRA, Playwrights Guild of Canada, and Banff’s Cultural Leadership 2018-19 cohort, and was honoured with the 2019 UBCP/ACTRA International Women’s Day Award in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the Union, the industry, and causes of social justice”.
Anju is an active, multi-disciplinary artist who has worked in the non-profit and arts sector for over 15 years. Alongside her passion for the arts, Anju is excited about the ways in which she can apply technology in her work in arts and the non-profit sector. Anju's degree in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University trained her for critical and analytic thinking, as well as a love for problem solving. Following her studies, her training was nicely rounded out by her experience working in arts and non-profit organizations where she developed values that prioritize people, relationships, and more equitable practices. Anju brings to CultureBrew.Art a breadth of skills including experience from the tech sector, non-profit management, human resources training, and a strong history of operations experience. As an artist and musician, Anju’s contributions and interests cross several artistic disciplines, an important element of CultureBrew.Art, and she brings extensive experience creating, producing, and showing artistic work.
Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, singer and event producer Larisa Sanders uses music as a medium to foster community. She has done so namely with her hip hop jam night called The Stew Jams which ran successfully for 2 years, fostering an unwavering community of diverse artists and creatives. The night acted as a connector for folks producing all types of media (music, visual art, videography, fashion, publications etc) within the street art communities with an emphasis on underrepresented voices. In essence, encouraging collaboration to help generate our city’s culture. Over the past 7 years, Larisa has played the role of stage manager, bar manager, curator, organizer, site manager and many more with organizations like Public Disco, Sofar Sounds, Vancouver Mural Festival, Tall Tree Music Festival and Pemberton Music Festival to name a few. Larisa currently works with students pursuing a career in Music Business as a Teacher’s Assistant and Instructor at Nimbus School of Recording Arts and Media and is the Label Manager for their in-house record label. With her deep love of harmony, you can see her sharing the stage with many local acts around town as well as fronting her own projects like the 5 piece all female hip hop group NADUH.
Born, raised and based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh, C.E. Gatchalian is a queer Filipinx diasporic author, theatre maker, producer, consultant and teacher. The author of six books and co-editor of two anthologies, he was the 2013 recipient of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, awarded annually by The Writers’ Trust of Canada to an outstanding emerging LGBTQI+ writer. He is also a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and the recipient of two Jessie Richardson Awards for his work as a theatre artist and producer. He has been Playwright-in-Residence at the Firehall Arts Centre and the Vancouver Playhouse, Artist-in-Residence at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education, and Writer-in-Residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House (Vancouver) and Berton House (Dawson City, YT). Formerly Artistic Producer of the frank theatre company, Vancouver’s professional queer theatre company, his plays have been produced locally, nationally and internationally. His memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, was published in Spring 2019 by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Matt has been a DJ for the past 10 years, a promoter for 9 years, and graphic designer for 6 years. Matt graduated from New Media Design and Web Development at BCIT, having built up web and graphic design skills which will be reinforced by years of experience working with artists.